Otherwise known as Electric Vehicles or EV’s. I wonder when shipping companies are going to stop transporting these things, car parks refusing to park them and insurance companies withdrawing coverage from both if they persist in dealing with them?

This is the third such incident I’ve seen reported:

A cargo ship transporting 3,000 cars was abandoned in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday after a massive fire broke out. As of Friday, the ship was still burning. The blaze may have been fueled by the vehicles’ lithium-ion batteries, which are notoriously difficult to extinguish once ignited.

The ship, named Morning Midas, was reportedly carrying 3,000 cars on a journey from Yantai, China to Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico. Of those vehicles, about 750 were fully electric or partial hybrids, powered at least in part by large lithium‑ion batteries that can short‑circuit and ignite extremely hot fires. Although the exact cause has yet to be determined, the Morning Midas crew reported smoke rising from the deck around midnight on Tuesday.

The fact that the crew acted quickly, tried to put out the fire with the ship’s fire suppression systems and failed, suggests an EV fire to me. Luckily nobody died. That wasn’t the case with the ship, Fremantle Highway, two years ago:

A fire broke out on the Fremantle Highway on July 25, 2023, shortly after the vessel left Germany loaded with approximately 3,800 vehicles including up to 55 electric vehicles. One crewmember died in a poorly organized evacuation of the vessel, but the others made it to safety in the Netherlands. The fire burned for a week before the vessel was brought to Eemshaven and later to Rotterdam for the salvage operation.

A little further back in time was the Felicity Ace, which was abandoned at sea in 2022 because of an EV-fueled fire. It eventually sank, taking with it a load of electric vehicles and luxury cars, including Porsches and Bentleys, plus the usual batch of toxic chemicals produced in the fire to poison the seabed below:

Thousands of cars, lithium-ion batteries, oil, gas, and an entire cargo ship now litter the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. On March 1, the car carrier Felicity Ace sank beneath the waves near the Portuguese Azores archipelago. Now, ecologists are worried that pollution from the wreck will impact the rich undersea environment the carrier has invaded.

How toxic? Burning lithium batteries release chemicals like hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen cyanide, as well as more ordinary stuff like carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide. It’s probably time some biologists were hired to study the seafloor results of all this.

It’s also only a matter of time before one of these goes up in some port, where the chemicals will not be entombed deep in the ocean but in a shallow harbour, and only after they drift across the surrounding city in the smoke.